Okay that makes sense. Ill see if I can get the pistons lowered and see if that makes a difference. If I'm still gettting the hard resistance from the crank, but the marks are all aligned, should I go ahead and put the belt on anyway and try starting by key? Or is it a must to be able to get the two full revolutions by hand first?

Whan all else fails we have obviously overlooked something, so I'll give you a quick check list of things to go over.

The last one of these I did was dead on the road with a shot timing belt which leads me to believe the valves will not hit the pistons. (although different years may have different specs) With that in mind here's a few other things that can bind up the crank and not cause anything to break unless you force it.

Coolant, oil, fuel in the cylinders from the tear down.
Dropped hardware into the bell housing or pulley area.
Dropped hardware into the intake during tear down.
Trany "in gear" but only an issue on a standard shift.

Okay thank you. I'm going to go through the checklist one by one and report back. My initial thoughts are maybe the tranny (automatic) in gear? I had noticed it was in park a few day ago and switched over to neutral, but I've tried turning it since it's been in neutral and it still gets held up. When you refer to spun bearings, you're talking about the cam bearings?

I also wanted to ask, how could I check that my camshaft sprocket gears are actually on correctly? What should the valves look like when the mark on the cams are lined up with their corresponding notches/marks?

If the auto trany was ok when you parked it then I doubt that's your problem. Even if it's in gear there should be no real change in "feel" because without the engine running there's nothing to engage the clutches.

The cam gears only go on one way so that basically eliminates that issue. (did you have them off?)

When I mentioned spun bearings I was talking about crankshaft bearings. You did say it was the crank that was hard to turn, right?

Dumb question, but did you by chance jack the car up under the bell housing and bind up the flywheel / torque converter?

I have a 94 Le Baron with the same problem.
Can I ask why you did all this work at once? Were you having problems before?
The reason I ask, mine was starting to cut out if I made a sharp right turns and somebody said it might be the fuel pump, did you do the fuel pump?

Hey Big Mike. This thread is over 2 years old so start a new one and give us YOUR EXACT issues so we don't get things confused. The guy never followed up to let us know the outcome so we don't have the whole story.